— Art complements medicine in this primary care clinic

After the kids are tucked into bed and the house has grown still, Clark Hardgrave, PA-C, gets comfortable behind the easel in the game room, mixes his acrylic set of beiges, browns, and pinks, and begins with a single stroke. If he's going to continue in the morning before seeing a dozen patients, he'll only have a couple of hours tonight to get this outline on the canvas.

Not to suggest the matter at hand is a stressor -- quite the opposite. This is something Hardgrave, who runs a primary care clinic out of the Psychiatric Center of the University of New Mexico Hospital, does for himself, to relax and clear his mind, express a feeling or gesture, and relieve the daily office pressures that have led to burnout in so many of his fellow clinicians.

"Nobody teaches you how to get away from the office," Hardgrave told MedPage Today. "It's easy to carry home all the problems that you've seen during the day or the medical questions you just can't solve that weigh on you. This is a great way to escape and clear your mind. A lot of people exercise or meditate and it does the same thing, but for me the artwork does it."

Sometimes, he is inspired by the colors of a floral arrangement, a facial expression, or a landscape. Other times, it's the fragmentary nature of an ancient Greek sculpture, robust in its inception, only to have a head, arm, or leg be destroyed or deteriorate over time.

Hardgrave has created still lifes, figurative portraits, and, most recently, a series inspired by the body. His style is largely contemporary, with soft and nearly formless strokes, originally created as sketches for future sculptures. (A few years ago, his primary medium was wood and alabaster, and he spent the majority of his time carving sculptures.)

For his next series, inspiration came while flipping through his gross anatomy lab notebook from his time at school, finding sketches he'd made a decade prior -- the bones and organs particularly striking him.

Hardgrave finds time around the edges of the day to paint, before work and bed, or even during his lunch break, pulling up programs like Photoshop or Sketchbook to jot down any ideas he's had throughout the day. When he's not painting, he is constantly brainstorming, so that when he gets half an hour throughout the day to work on a piece, he doesn't suffer from creative block.

To Hardgrave, the relationship he has with medicine and art strikes a balance: between right and left brain, analysis and creativity, and serving his patients and taking care of the self. Sometimes, providing himself with this time and allowing his mind to go elsewhere results in a eureka moment, he says. While he paints, his brain subconsciously puts things together, solving a case for a patient he may have seen earlier in the day or week.

The idea of art advancing medicine isn't new. The Scottish physician Alexander Fleming used bacteria samples as paint, maturing those of various colors into his own living palette, and then inoculating sections with a wire lab tool to create his illustrations -- a ballerina, soldier, a mother and child, among others. It was atop one of these artworks that his "ah-ha" moment literally germinated: penicillin, the antibiotic that would go on to save millions of lives.

The eureka moments aren't Hardgrave's primary motivation, however, but rather an added perk. To him, the main impetus is to free himself, balancing the anxiety and overwhelming information that floods his brain at work with some quiet time where he can let himself go.

"[Medical cases] are a very analytical, reasoning activity and this is so divorced from that," Hardgrave said. "I don't meditate, but I describe it as meditative because your mind gets totally absorbed. It's a vacation that prevents burnout, an escape 2 hours a day where I'm taken away from everything. That's how [art and medicine] work in my mind, as compliments that help each other."

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